The phrase of the day is taken from the story “Arabia”, contained in James Joyce’s collection “Dubliners”, published in 1914 after eighteen refusals by fifteen different publishing houses.
The quote with which we propose to start the day is “My body was like a harp and the words and gestures of her like fingers on his strings” by James Joyce , whose birth we remember today on February 2, 1882.
James Joyce
James Joyce is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. After studying in Jesuit colleges, he distinguished himself at the University of Dublin for his preparation and wit as a linguist. After moving away from the Catholic religion, he left Ireland for Paris, where he studied medicine for a few months, before returning to Dublin for the death of his mother. From 1904 he moved first to Trieste, where he taught at the Berlitz School and where he made friends with Italo Svevo ; then to Zurich and finally to Paris, which he left shortly before his death due to the Nazi invasion and a severe depression. Returning to Zurich, he underwent an ulcer and died in the hospital the next day.
After a first approach to writing, in which he follows the traditional expressive forms of narrative prose, Joyce begins to experiment, inspired by the first theories on psychoanalysis. In 1922 he published “Ulysses” , a work of extraordinary importance for all future literature, in which he began to use the “stream of consciousness” technique , which consists in the free expression of thoughts as they appear on the protagonist’s mind.
